RAGE on PC is a mess, but you can fix some of it

RAGE is a disappointment on the consoles when it comes to gameplay. On the PC, the game may struggle to work at all, depending on your configuration. This is a sad state of affairs for a developer that was once known for its innovative, and in some cases revolutionary, PC releases. RAGE suffers from tearing, massive texture pop-in, and an overall lack of graphical options to tweak and adjust.

There are a few things you can do to fight this, but it’s clear we’re going to be waiting on a number of patches before things will run smoothly.

How to make things better

The game is going to run better on NVIDIA hardware than AMD video cards, at least at the moment, but you can download the newest AMD drivers to help things along. AMD had released an earlier version of the drivers, but then warned gamers not to use them. The link above is to the latest driver, so it should help performance; ATI promises to release a unified driver that offers the optimizations for both RAGE and Battlefield 3 in the near future.

I’ve been using the Battlefield 3 beta drivers for my Geforce GTX 580 card, and the game looks great, with no texture issues, although the screen tearing is still prominent in some scenes. I’m also using a pair of SSDs as a hard drive, so I’m able to stream the texture data from the game very efficiently. Players with more traditional hard drive solutions will be more likely to see the pop-in issues. Also keep in mind drivers are being released rapidly, so be sure to check to see if there has been a new update.

If you’d like to enable the developer console, right click on RAGE in your library on Steam, click on properties, select the launch options, and add “+set com_allowconsole 1” in the box. Keep in mind, this will take away your ability to gain achievements. Bring up the console by hitting the tilde button, and then type “listcvars” or “listcmds” to see everything you can tweak. If you don’t want to mess with the console or you’d like to keep your achievements, just put the following text into the launch options:

+cvaradd g_fov 12 +com_skipIntroVideo 1 +image_anisotropy 16 +image_usecompression 0 +g_showplayershadow 1 +m_smooth 0

That will increase your field of view, take away the introduction video, set anisotropic filtering to 16X, take away mouse smoothing, and kill the compression that seems to be giving some people trouble. Everyone’s rig is different, however, so feel free to experiment and find what works for you. Adding “+r_swapInterval 1” will also force V-sync, which may take care of some of the tearing.

Bethesda itself has released a few tips for getting the game to run well:

The higher the resolution at which the game renders and the higher the anti-aliasing setting, the more texture data is needed to texture the environment. If you do not have a high-end CPU you may momentarily see blurrier textures and texture popping when the view changes quickly.

If you have a processor with few cores and you have a high end NVIDIA graphics card then you can try turning on the “GPU Transcode” menu option in the video settings menu in RAGE. By enabling this option a large percentage of the texture calculations are moved to the graphics processor (GPU). However, this option is not available on all graphics hardware and may not appear in the menu if your hardware does not support the necessary features.

It’s interesting to note that while RAGE will work well on a wide variety of graphics cards, this is one of the rare games where storage and CPU make a huge difference in the graphical fidelity and speed at which textures are added. “It is pretty obvious at this point that while the MegaTexture technology is amazing from a purely scientific angle, it was built for the console generation where memory is at a premium and latency is at a minimum,” Ryan Shrout of PC Perspective wrote. “While PCs have the exact opposite specifications, lots of memory and higher latency due to software layers, the game engine doesn’t take advantage of the performance advantages offered to it.”